1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to social networks, more particularly, to how people are connected together to create a social network.
2. Description of the Related Art
In computer and telecommunications networks, presence information is a status indicator that conveys the ability and willingness of a potential communication partner to communicate.
A basic feature of a telephone (including cell phones, desktop phones, wireless phones, Internet phones, etc.) is the address book. Most computers (including desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablet computer, etc.) also have some form of address book. An address book is a data base used for storing entries called contacts. Each contact entry usually consists of a few standard fields (for example, first name, last name, company name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, fax number, and mobile phone number). In this document the term, address book, refers to this database. The terms, phone, computer, and device, refer to any phone, computer, and device (both phone and computer), respectively, equipped with an address book having the ability to access the Internet.
The act of someone storing a contact in the address book is an implicit indication that she knows the entity (a person or a company) that the contact is describing. It is also an implicit indication that the users of two devices know each other if the address book of each device contains the contact information of the other person.
A number of systems exist include a means by which users can voluntarily announce their presence on the system. Relevant presence information, which is also referred to herein as “presence”, is made available to those on the system that wish to receive the information.
A social network, as used in the present specification, is a data structure that ties individuals and organizations together. One or more specific types of interdependency connect these entities. The most common method of creating a social network is based on the paradigm of invitation. There are several methods for invitation. The system can send invitations to those who are not members of the system yet. To be able to invite, the inviter must already have the invitee's contact information available. The most common source of such contact information is an address book. Moreover, a member of the social network can search for and find the user identifier of an already registered invitee with whom she wants to become friends with. The user sends an invitation message to the invitee to initialize the process of becoming friends. After the invitation has been sent, the inviter waits for the invitee in an asynchronous manner to confirm the invitation by replying to the message in a positive manner. This process of “friending” has to be carried out for each invitee in order to build a network. One drawback of the method is that the asynchronous nature of the invitation/response process slows down the creation of individual connections. Furthermore, repeating the manual process of creating a connection makes the method cumbersome to use.